Never is a coming-of-age story in the segregated South. Now in his seventies, "Little" Nickerson confronts a childhood he has kept “encased in glass." He narrates a boy’s journey from his suburban home to the textile mills, where workers haggle over the price of a slice of watermelon; to a Black church, where the congregation drums the floor in a thunderous response to a call for equal rights; to a shotgun shack, a book-lined study, and a hidden spring; to a burned-out barn, where men shoot rats, drink beer, and mock the cause of civil rights.